Shows Of Youth

When I was young, one of the things that was very popular was ABC's Friday night "TGIF" lineup. These days, I don't think any network bothers to program Friday night with anything original. Even then I imagine that Friday night was for kids specifically for the reason that it was fertile ground for anything more. Anyway, I occasionally watched those shows, but I was not disciplined enough to watch anything regularly.

A friend had a party whose central purpose was to watch a the TGIF shows from a particular week October, 1993. I would have been ten years old, and the odds are sharply against my having been watching then. If I was, I don't remember seeing these shows. I frankly did not find that they held up, but then I don't know that I really enjoyed them in the first place. I guess I liked them better then, if only because I couldn't see how dumb they were.

Here's how these ones played out: On "Family Matters", Eddie makes the mistake of hiring Waldo to work at the hot dog restaurant while Laura is embarrassed by her mom while her cheerleader friends are over. On "Boy Meets World", Cory cheats on an IQ test and is briefly thought to be a genius. On "Step By Step", the nerdy kid is addicted to video games and one of the daughters tries to hide her hickey with help from Cody. On "Hanging With Mr. Cooper, Mr Cooper helps Irvin (Earvin? Irving?) reconnect with his estranged father.

Those shows really did seem better at the time. The jokes seemed like jokes, the drama worked, the characters seemed deep and likable, and if I didn't watch them consistently, I wanted to. If I had a kid of my own watching the same stuff, I'm sure I'd turn off the TV and tell him to go do something else (or else I'd let him watch what he wanted and check in with him years down the line to see how he'd changed his tune about them).